He leapt up again. He had sat on a gorse-bush. Gay put up her hands to her eyes and giggled helplessly.
Giggling, she heard him say, hardly, “If you’ve got hysterics, you can get out of them. I’m off to see what’s happened.”
He was. He had jumped to his feet again. He had broad shoulders and shapely hips, except for one with a great scar, like that of a branding-iron, across it. Gay stared at the scar, herself standing up. “Where can you go? ... And where did that happen to you?” He stared over his shoulder, angry and ludicrous. “Eh? What? What happen?” He coloured again, richly. “War-time wound.”
“I see. And where are you going?”
“To find...” he stared around, “some house.”
“Does it look as though there are any?”
It did not. The fact seemed to sink into their unevenly beating hearts. It was a land wild and forgotten. No human feet had trodden it, or voices called here, or the busy world of men reached out a hand here for long ages. The sunlight ran its colours up and down the near hills, gay with gorse. Far off a peewit wailed its immemorial plaint. There was no mark of cultivation or sign of human kind. Gay said, very quietly:
“Something has happened to us. I don’t know what. But we’re here, lost, as though we’d been newly born. If we’re going to search out anything, perhaps we’d best do it together.” She shaded her eyes with her hand, looking towards the tumuli. Without much hope: “There might be something to help us in those mounds.”
They set out, almost side by side, across the spring of the grass. In Gay’s mind was a bubbling tumult of thought and speculation, backgrounded by a horrible fear which she closed away. That wouldn’t help, she’d to keep sane; and keep up with the headache man; and be thankful she’d a decent figure under these shy-making circumstances.
She glanced down at it, nicely browned, and felt absurdly cheered. Houghton swung beside her in silence, his neat, thinned Greek profile rigidly towards her, his eyes fixed ahead. She suddenly realised that he was elaborately and painstakingly not looking at her. Also, that he was wishing, with an angry embarrassment, that she would not look at him.
They came in silence to the foot of the great mounds. There were three of them, matted in long, coarse grass. Gay went through the space between the nearer two and saw beyond merely such rolling hill-country, rolling deserted to the horizon’s edge, as lay to the west. She heard Houghton breathing, coming round the corner.
“They’re just hills.”
Gay shook her head. “Mounds, I think. I’ve dug ancient ones in Mexico, and they’ve much these shapes, ruined buildings with a thousand years or so of the blowing of sand and earth on the top of them...” She stopped, appalled. “Oh, God!”
He barked, “Eh?”—it must have been his tribal war-cry staring about him. But Gay was merely looking blankly at the mounds. She said:
“I don’t know much of the Pewsey country,but there were no mounds near the village last night. None marked on any archaeological map. If these have taken years to accumulate, then...”
For the first time their eyes met, and she saw herself globed in the light grey eyes of Houghton—shallow, puzzled eyes, faintly red-rimmed. She saw her face, strained and white, in that reflection, above her brown throat... Houghton looked away.
“Then this can’t be the Pewsey district.”
“But it is. That hill over there—I saw it as I went to sleep last night—if it was last night.” She felt suddenly breathless and sat down. “Listen, what did you do when you went to bed last night?”
“What? Tried the formula of this Dunne rubbish you talked about.”
“Did you have any success?” Gay’s voice sounded far away to herself. “Stuff like nightmare after a bit. Half-dozing, I suppose. The lightning cracked into the stuff and made my headache twice as bad. Then I slipped into the stuff again—damned rubbish. Woke up and saw you.”
“This rubbishy dream stuff—did you have a sensation of going at a tremendous rate—slipping over the brink of a precipice?”
He scowled in thought. “No. Something—like going up a spiral staircase, and lights winking in and out from the windows. Anyhow, what does it matter? What’s it to do with this—blasted insanity?”
“I’m not sure—yet.’ Gay Hunter still felt breathless. That, and queer, as though she was about to be sick. “But I’ve a guess—oh, hell ’n’ blast, it can’t be, it can’t be!”
“All this is rot to me. Look here, if we’re going together, we might as well start. I’m going on—to get clothes somewhere, and back to London, whatever has happened here in Wiltshire.”
Gay stood up, slowly, a queer look on her face. “All right? East?”
“That’s the direction of London, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s the direction of London. Or was.”
“Eh?”
She gripped his naked arm. “What’s that?”
That was a movement in the long grass at a distance of ten yards or so from the mounds—a movement that ended in a tall, blonde woman, unclad as themselves, with a scared, astounded face, rising into full view and staring at them with horrified eyes. Gay blinked her own eyes at the sight. Had the whole damn landscape been showered with undraped females in the night? O Lord, she was going mad...
“Ledyard!”
Houghton stood halted, staring, a dismayed, agonised, smoking-room-story blush in effigy.
“Jane!”
Gay slumped down in the grass, too wearied with surprises even to giggle. “Do introduce us.”
“Eh? What? Oh Lord, Jane! ...This is Lady Jane Easterling, Miss Hunter.”
Gay Hunter will be published by Shoreline of Infinity late 2016.
Interviews: Ken MacLeod
and Tricia Sullivan
by Gary Dalkin
Ken MacLeod and Tricia Sullivan have both have contributed stories to Improbable Botany, a new anthology of SF and fantasy on botanical themes. Here they talk to the anthology’s editor, Gary Dalkin.
Ken MacLeod
Gary Dalkin: Your contribution to Improbable Botany, The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy is a stand-alone story set in the same world as your novel Intrusion. Heather at Wayward Plants (the publisher of Improbable Botany) was especially intrigued by the bicycle-frame trees and other synthetic biology elements in the book, but just how did the story germinate?
Ken MacLeod: The bicycle-frame trees and synthetic biology aspects of Intrusion had been inspired by art projects by Daisy Ginsberg and James King, who visited the Genomics Forum in 2010 and gave slide-show presentations of their work including Daisy’s Growth Assembly: www.daisyginsberg.com/work/growth-assembly
It struck me that there was more to be done in that world, exploring its botanical manufactures and soft totalitarianism, and that story was the result.
GD: Do you think you will explore other botanical matters in future works? There’s been comparatively little botanically-based SF written over the years. Have you any thoughts as to why this might be?
KM: Well, plants aren’t obviously exciting—unless they move and sting, as in The Day of the Triffids, or cover the planet as in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse, or die off and leave us to starve as in John Christopher’s The Death of Grass ... But synthetic biology and genetic engineering open up new possibilities, and because plants are simpler and cheaper and more socially acceptable to modify than animals, I expect more real technology along those lines and thus more botanical SF (and technothrillers) in the future. I have no further ideas about plants for the moment, but who knows?
GD: You began your career with two series of novels, the Fall Revolution quartet and the Engines of Light trilogy, but since Engine City in 2002 completed the latter sequence each of your books has been a self-contained, stand alone work. Now, with The Corporation Wars: Dissidence you’ve returned both to the trilogy format and to space opera. Uploaded dead war criminals conscripted to fight an outbreak of robot sentience in an extrasolar system (to quote the description on your blog), would seem quite a change of direction from Intrusion and Descent. So why space opera now, and why a trilogy? The title of the new series would suggest concerns about capitalism remain important to the work.
KM: After the War on Terror, fundamentalism, healthism, and capitalism, I’d pretty much run out of hot social topics ... No, actually this series came about because out of several pitches to my publishers it was the one they were excited about, and it became a trilogy because that’s how excited about it they were.
